I thought I should start with something easy-mysteries-and happened to find Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, Chandler's The Long Goodbye and Ambler's The Intercom Conspiracy-books about entanglement, love, guilt and the possibility or impossibility of redemption. The reading was hard and I made them mine sentence by sentence, word by word. Then there are books that I will never forget because I read them when I started reading in English. ![]() I never felt the urge to analyze why I am happy with them and also with the Odyssey, a book that keeps surprising and amazing me. These are books I read and reread to be happy. I am most at home with 19th-century literature-Stendhal, Hawthorne, Chekhov, Keller and Fontane. The bond between the two is continued in this unique way until Hanna's release from prison, when, in the face of Michael's ambivalence and Hanna's shame, their story reaches its anguished conclusion.Ī parable of German guilt and atonement and a love story of stunning power, The Reader is also a work of literature that is unforgettable in its psychological complexity, its moral nuances and its stylistic restraint. To help himself through nights of insomnia, he begins to read his favorite books aloud into a tape recorder and sends the tapes to Hanna in prison. Married and divorced, Michael has become a scholar of legal history and suffers from a haunting emotional numbness. She chooses not to reveal her secret and, as a result, is sentenced to life. During the proceedings, it becomes clear that Hanna is hiding something that is-to her-more shameful than murder, something that could possibly save her from going to prison. He is shocked when he recognizes Hanna in the courtroom, on trial with a group of former concentration camp guards. ![]() Years later, when Michael is studying law at the university, he is part of a seminar group attending one of the many belated Nazi war crime trials. When Hanna disappears after a misunderstanding, Michael is overcome with guilt and loss. Later, he visits the woman to thank her and is drawn into a love affair that is as intoxicating as it is unusual-their meetings become a ritual of reading aloud (Michael reads to Hanna, at her request), taking showers and making love. When he gets sick in the street one day on his way home from school, a woman brings him into her apartment and helps him to wash up. Michael Berg is 15 and suffering from hepatitis.
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